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> less then him succeeded They didn't succeed; they finished a significantly reduced project, likely for management to finally show some results to investors.

by bitL 9y ago

> less then him succeeded They didn't succeed; they finished a significantly reduced project, likely for management to finally show some results to investors. If you were ever writing some complex project, there are things you might not have anticipated that need a lot of care to be resolved, which is why making estimates is so difficult in creative industries. Let's have a different take: imagine "Rick" was working on proper distributed transaction support in e.g. inter-banking communication from the scratch, as that was what business needed. He underestimated the complexity in the beginning, finding more and more corner cases that would reduce high availability that was crucial for the product. This led him to work days and nights in order to solve every single issue that appeared, if he wanted to be honest to himself, his conscience, and not sell a fraud as his final product. Unfortunately, he didn't see anyone in his team capable of actually helping him share the burden. He could have probably done a PhD thesis with the amount of work it required. Now, investors/management after plenty broken deadlines for this overly optimistic project decided to fire Rick and move on with the rest of the team. In order to ship anything, they decided to remove transactions completely, making it a simple CRUD app, that cannot be used for financially critical tasks and was appealing to a much smaller market (imagine small banks vs large multinationals). This app was what the team delivered quickly. They finally could show the results to their investors, and were supper happy and proud of their achievement. As some investors still had a bad taste in their mouth from broken promises, management decided to blame/shame Rick publicly to identify proper scapegoat. Rick is now burned out, soon to be homeless, trying to recover from the 2 insane years, and likely out of doing any great work for the foreseeable future, if not forever. Moreover, his name is now blacklisted, because everybody in the industry took the side of management/investors and will never hire him.

watwut 9y ago
Have you even read article? Customer was happy with smaller scope and it was agreed upon in advance! The original project got large also due to change requests and conflicting requerements, these got managed this time. I did worked on complex projects and estimations, negotiation and communication about delays is more important there, not less. So is ability to work with people you don't like or consider lesser. Given that the same team was able to produce smaller scope project, it is pretty sure they were able to do at least some parts of original project. The rest frankly reads like fanfiction. As heroic as decision to spend nights in work and do it alone was, it was not rational decision.
- bitL 9y ago
  Obviously I was using a hyperbole, amplifying some angles, to get my point across as I thought that in your replies there was a lot of one sidedness. Frankly, I have seen many companies normalizing mediocrity and chasing away their best developers, or even blaming them for their own shortcomings, instead of fully utilizing what they could offer them, which IMO is a tragedy. So instead of just agreeing to what most replies alluded to, i.e. the Rick was a mediocre, uncommunicative and disorganized asshole with a heroic complex, I offered an alternate point of view that maybe the bigger problem was on the other side, for the sake of balanced view.

by bitL 9y ago

watwut 9y ago

Have you even read article? Customer was happy with smaller scope and it was agreed upon in advance! The original project got large also due to change requests and conflicting requerements, these got managed this time. I did worked on complex projects and estimations, negotiation and communication about delays is more important there, not less. So is ability to work with people you don't like or consider lesser. Given that the same team was able to produce smaller scope project, it is pretty sure they were able to do at least some parts of original project. The rest frankly reads like fanfiction. As heroic as decision to spend nights in work and do it alone was, it was not rational decision.

bitL 9y ago
Obviously I was using a hyperbole, amplifying some angles, to get my point across as I thought that in your replies there was a lot of one sidedness. Frankly, I have seen many companies normalizing mediocrity and chasing away their best developers, or even blaming them for their own shortcomings, instead of fully utilizing what they could offer them, which IMO is a tragedy. So instead of just agreeing to what most replies alluded to, i.e. the Rick was a mediocre, uncommunicative and disorganized asshole with a heroic complex, I offered an alternate point of view that maybe the bigger problem was on the other side, for the sake of balanced view.